Tag Archives: Podcast

Planet took the opportunity while presenting at the Canadian SmallSat Symposium to deliver a very public ultimatum to Global Affairs Canada. Either there is measurable progress on licensing of their ground stations in Inuvik by June 1, or they will dismantle them and leave Canada. And they weren’t the only company to threaten this action.

In the last week and half there’s been an ongoing discussion as to whether Canada needs and should develop an indigenous orbital rocket launch capability. That’s the topic of this weeks podcast.

My guest this week on the SpaceQ podcast is Chris Gebhardt, Assistant Managing Editor of NASASpaceflight.com. Chris and I talked about SpaceX, specifically the upcoming maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

SkyWatch today announced that it had raised $4 million in its seed round of funding to continue development of its Earth Observation platform EarthCache.

What if you could put a Synthetic Aperture Radar on small satellite? Would this disrupt the existing market? That’s exactly what Finnish company ICEYE has done and is trying to do. 

The goal of sending Humans to Mars has been a driving force for many in the space community for decades. In 1949 Dr. Wernher von Braun, who was instrumental in developing the U.S. rocket program, published the seminal book, Project Mars, a Technical Tale. As recently as last year, NASA was marketing an eventual human mission to Mars as the Journey to Mars.

China has set a very ambitious launch schedule for 2018 announcing in early January it would try to conduct over 40 government and commercial launches.

This week on the SpaceQ podcast we did something a little different. Instead of interviewing a guest we decided to playback a speech we recorded from the recent Canadian Space Summit by Canadian Space Agency president Sylvain Laporte.

My guest this week on the SpaceQ podcast is Michelle Mendes, the Executive Director and President of the Canadian Space Commerce Association.

If I told you that over the course of the last seven years upwards of a thousand Canadian students had participated in developing CubeSat missions you might think this was a the result of a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) initiative. You would be wrong though. There was a time the CSA was interested in this, early this decade and before, but poor leadership in government, and to …